


I recall your soul had a taste like --

by maximoffs



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Budapest, M/M, Memory Related, There's talk of death and I'm sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-14
Updated: 2016-06-14
Packaged: 2018-07-14 23:34:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7195775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maximoffs/pseuds/maximoffs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“May flowers grow in the saddest parts of you.”</p><p>I dunno, I guess I listened to SZA's "Warm Winds" on repeat and wanted to write about memory and loss, which kind of sums up the relationship between these two whether you want to see them as romantic or platonic. This is definitely more on the romantic side, but also weird and slightly AU (though, who knows what happened between TWS & CW).</p>
            </blockquote>





	I recall your soul had a taste like --

I.

The gravedigger slept in the field behind the graveyard and he planted the flowers that grew there. It was good to work with your hands; this is something his mother had taught him. She had taught him also, that where flowers bloomed, other things would follow. So he sowed the seeds he had kept all of these years, before they took him away. 

Today, hydrangeas. Yesterday had been lavender, and forget-me-nots. Forget-me-nots were ironic because he forgot a lot, and in return was forgotten. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Whatever he found, he stuck in the ground. It didn’t matter—not really—whether they crept up or died in the womb; the point was to keep going, even when his arm seized. And after, the gravedigger went back to his apartment, took a shower, changed his clothes. His gloves were soiled with earth and bone. His hair stuck to his cheeks. 

Anyway, the hydrangeas—they would be pink and gold, like sunsets in Brooklyn. No. That was wrong. Siberia—no. The photo slides skipped in his mind, stuttering, until he blinked at the dirt in front of him. Budapest. He was in Budapest, where the sunsets looked like hydrangeas, where he was born, where he had lived all his life. He blinked again, footsteps behind him, which meant he had been caught off guard, he had compromised himself, he could run or he could fight. His arm itched under the sweater, the jacket, the layers between his body and the shocking air (the open space) (the freedom), itched for the fifteen and a half seconds it took for him to process there was no threat. 

“Gravedigger,” the voice behind him said.

He frowned and turned toward the voice, squinting up at the sun. Not the sun, a man. 

“Will you dig me a grave?”

For you, the gravedigger asked in reply, raising a lopsided smile. His shovel was twenty feet away, leaning against this headstone: an angel with her hair pulled back, head against forearm in despair, the other arm flung over the stone. Her wings were folded against her like a shield. 

“No,” the man said. He became clearer when the gravedigger’s eyes adjusted, tall and strong, almost translucent in the light. “For a friend.”

Where is the body, the gravedigger asked.

“Lost.”

The gravedigger stood, brushing the dirt from his gloves into his jeans. 

“Did you plant these yourself?” the man asked, after a minute, receiving a nod. “They’re beautiful.”

Thank you. How did you lose a body?

“How long did they take to grow?”

The gravedigger looked at the field, as if seeing it for the first time. His head could not remember the places it had lain, or the time that had passed. Go home, stand in the heat of the shower, come back, slip the gloves over his fingers. Take the shovel, lift the caskets, set the seeds down. Was that right? No. Go home, shower, gloves. Come back. The mud and the blood and the wet leaves clung to him when he came back.

“I was careless.”

With the body of your friend, the gravedigger said. He was catching on, because he caught on quickly. 

“I wish he knew,” the man’s voice caught. “I wish he knew how sorry—”

Dead men don’t care, he cut off. Flowers brushed his feet. The gravedigger didn’t want to have this conversation any longer. 

“Bucky,” the man began. The man’s name was Steve. The gravedigger had a name once too, but they took it and replaced it with steel, the taste of blood. His teeth carried the bones of lesser men. Lavender creeped at his ankles and he knew that, also, was stained.

Your friend is dead and you don’t have a body to bury, the gravedigger pointed out. Why do you need a hole in the ground? You can’t fill absence with absence.

“Bucky,” Steve said again, more pleading this time, but the gravedigger didn’t want to look at him. It happened quickly. The man—Steve—put a hand on his arm, and the gravedigger threw him, unresisting, to the ground. On his back. In the gravedigger’s flowers, on his back. 

Don’t do that.

He didn’t like to be touched. He liked to be left alone; back home, in the shower, scalding his back. The gloves on the kitchen counter, something taped to the refrigerator door. A photo. Steve sat up slowly, breaking the gravedigger’s concentration. What was taped there. How hot did the water get.

“Dig two, then,” Steve said, pulling his knees to his chest. “I’ll pay you for two.”

The gravedigger shrugged.

Two dead friends? He asked, finally.

“The friends died together.”

A nerve in Bucky’s jaw twitched, although he was very still. He had made a habit out of stillness, which came in handy for the work he did. The work he did hunting. The slides skipped one another again, rearranging themselves in the shaky compartments of his brain. Rifles pointed at deer in the woods, then men. Rifles collapsing into themselves, becoming bigger, blacker. All of the pieces shuffling themselves over and out. 

“Will you make two?”

What will you do, Bucky asked. He cleared his throat, the gravedigger. He wrung his hands together, scratching at the left.

“I’m tired, Buck.”

Bucky scowled. He stared hard at Steve. So go home.

“The graves, Buck.”

No.

 

II.

The apartment was cold and he did not sleep there. The gravedigger stripped off his clothes, turned the dial of the hot water all the way up, sat next to the drain, and watched the dirt clump out of his hair. Dirt, or blood, or steel. His mouth tasted like all three.

Every day the man came to see the flowers grow but this was the first time he spoke. Every day the man came and brought a shift of light with him: softer, honeyed like mid-morning. The gravedigger sat cross-legged in the shower and thought of him. Steve and his graves. He wouldn’t dig them, he decided, not both of them. Not for all the money in the world, he wouldn’t dig them. He had planted the flowers already. He would not dig the graves as well. 

He waited until the water grew cool, then the gravedigger dried his hair. He found a new set of clothes and the gloves he put on without looking. 

When he went back to the field the man was still there. 

I said no, the gravedigger said as way of greeting.

“I can wait until you change your mind,” Steve said, and folded his hands in front of him. “I’m patient.”

Not going to change my mind, the gravedigger muttered. One grave.

“Two.”

A grave needs a body.

“I see two here.”

The gravedigger looked up at him sharply. He ground his teeth together, bits of sand and sleet on his tongue. This felt personal, and then not. This felt like being in four places at once, the little island on the coast and the place with the rifles rebirthing, the place where Steve stood and the place the gravedigger stood. Bucky looked at his feet, and he looked at Steve. 

He walked into the cemetery and Steve followed. He picked up the shovel and he pushed it toward Steve. Steve: the man from the paper. The man who brought the sun. What was taped to his fridge? When had the water cooled? There was an empty plot of land. There were headstones waiting by it. The gravedigger glanced from the barrenness under his feet to the field behind him, the colors glowing and dangerous in the night. You could put anything in the earth. 

He sat by a headstone waiting, and Steve began to dig. It was well into the night when he finished both of them, slick with sweat, dirty, gleaming, haunted. The gravedigger knew this is not what he looked like when he dug the graves he dug, except for the expression. The man’s expression was terrible.

They’re uneven, the gravedigger said with the same lopsided smile.

Steve almost laughed—a rush of air exhaled too quickly. “I don’t have your experience.”

No.

Bucky looked into one like maybe he could see the other side. When he looked back at Steve, he could not explain the aching in his chest. 

“My friend and I died together,” Steve said, as if prompted. He let the shovel drop against one of the headstones, brushed the sweat from his forehead. “I looked for him, but he never answered.”

Bucky blinked.

“I should have gone back for him, but I couldn’t. It’s no excuse—‘I couldn’t.’ You always can. You can always go back. When my friend died, so did I. In a way.”

You must have loved him, the gravedigger said, toneless.

Steve looked him square in the eye. It felt like something from the past, lungful of ice water. Fists to the gut. Two broken ribs. It felt like that, and the gravedigger looked away.

“Still do.”

The gravedigger hunted for words. It had been so long since his last conversation and he was rusty; the rust coughed out of him and screeched in the place where his arm had been. The rust clouded his eyes and seeped into blood vessels while he slept. It ate through ’33, ’42, ’58, ’60. It ate and it ate and it ate. He felt hands on his face. Steve, crouching in front of him, knees pressing knees.

“I still do,” he said. His hands were in Bucky’s hair now, brushing it back. Down his neck, at his shoulders, stiff and impenetrable. “Come back.”

The gravedigger shook his head, kept shaking it. The hands were too much, and they overloaded the panels of thought rushing through his bad mind. They flashed and crackled until the photo slides began to fast forward. It was like this: a movie, but cut up, the sound off and replaced with anachronistic music, the soundtrack of a foreign play or battle field, wrought with static, the picture out of order and hazy. The gravedigger shook his head until Steve found his temples, brushed the tips of his fingers over them, and then he was still.

They sat like that, and he watched the man. He watched his careless, unfiltered bravery. The man pressed his lips against Bucky’s forehead, very slowly, and then stood up, slower. The gravedigger knew it was over; that he had won. The man would leave and he would go back to his flowers and his bodies. He would stick his hands back into the earth, where they belonged, and soon he would stick the rest in there too, and it would grow back newer, better, stronger. Or it would not. He had won; the man would leave. The man would never come back again.

The gravedigger thought of the water and the blood. The absence of warmth where Steve’s knees had been. All of this registered and registered again, so cruel he thought all the flowers would die in the night, right there, with the headstones around watching. 

Your mother’s name was Sarah, he said to the ground.

Steve stopped. “Yeah, it was.”

The gravedigger nodded. What else was there?

Something hung, suspended in the air between them, heavy and tough to hold. The man grazed his teeth over his bottom lip. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything there was.”

Again, Bucky nodded. He crossed his legs, jeans and gloves covered in dirt. Dirt on the tip of his chin. Dirt on the corner of Steve’s cheekbone. He waited until Steve came back, and returned his knees to his knees. He waited, and Steve began to speak, and hours passed, and he told him everything there was, and day began to break like a low, gracious hymn (gold like Brooklyn) (like home), and he told him everything there would be now, how the fields would grow into gardens, how the flowers would bloom and bloom, and rise high enough to cover the tombstones and all the angels that lived there, how two graves would be filled again, with only dirt.


End file.
